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In today's video, I have brought in the amazing Squarespace SEO expert Charlotte O'Hara to help me answer one of the most common questions I get - Is Squarespace bad for SEO? Watch this video to find out!

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Is Squarespace Bad for SEO? Answered! - Squarespace SEO Expert Charlotte O'Hara

Louise: Welcome back to another Squarespace SEO video. In today’s video, we are going to be tackling one of the biggest questions we get when it comes to Squarespace SEO, and that is, is Squarespace bad for SEO? This is a big topic and we’re excited to dive in and give you our answer.

For Squarespace SEO, you know that my favorite expert is Charlotte of Charlotteohara.ca. She is back here with me again to answer this big question.

Charlotte: Hi Louise. Hi everyone that’s watching. I am a Squarespace SEO expert, and without a doubt, the number one question that we get is, is Squarespace bad for SEO? Is Squarespace good for SEO? The answer is No – Squarespace is not bad for SEO. It’s actually really good.

High Quality Content

If you think about SEO, we’re talking about search engine optimization, and what that means is that there are a lot of different factors in play - it’s not just specific to the website platform that you’re using. Squarespace is your website hosting platform, but it’s all about what kind of content you have on your website. How are you serving your ideal audience? Are you giving them high quality content, lots of resources, really good text, is it formatted correctly? Are you bringing in lots of good information for them? All of those things are way more important than the platform that your website is being built on.

Louise: Exactly. So, using one platform over another is not automatically going to give you better SEO. I love that you said that Charlotte. It’s more about the content and the domain authority that you build up. What else do people need to know about Squarespace SEO?

Google Integrations

Charlotte: Another thing I want to talk about with Squarespace SEO, is that Squarespace as a platform has lots of really good integrations with Google, which, as you know, is probably the most important search engine out there. No disrespect to Bing, but Google takes the cake. The good thing with Squarespace is that they give you the prompts to do certain integrations with Google. For example, Google Analytics. Once you sign up for your Google Analytics account, you just plunk that code right into a website. Even easier, is submitting your website to Google’s Search Console. That basically means that you’re verifying your domain (like charlotteohara.ca) – you’re verifying that you own that and that you want Google to pick it up. Again, that’s a feature directly built into the Squarespace platform. You can go ahead, follow their instructions, and get it done. Squarespace want you to be set up properly for SEO. They have all the SEO fields that you can fill out for every single page – it’s a really good platform for it.

Louise: Yes. I think there’s so much that you can do, and they’ve really been purposeful with all of the features that they’ve given to us. When you look at all of the top tips for what you need to do with SEO, you can achieve all of those with Squarespace.

Charlotte: One hundred percent! One of the biggest parts about having a good quality website is creating amazing content, it’s reaching your ideal audience, and so with that, you can use some of Squarespace’s formatting features. Use the titles, put in all the headers. If you’re adding images into your website or your blog posts, make sure that you’re naming them correctly, because, remember, Google can’t see your images – you have to tell them what the image is about by using the image name field. All of these different factors that you can use are going to make sure that you have amazing content on your website. When you have really good content on your website, then Google wants to share that, and they’ll reward you by putting you higher up into the search results for different keywords or search terms that people are using.

Louise: Absolutely. Google really is just so smart in what they’re doing - they’re really just looking for the best content. If you keep that in mind each time you decide you want to rank for something, think about what you can do to post the absolutely best content.

Charlotte: Exactly. Again, just to reiterate what we’ve said before, it’s not so much about the platform, it’s about how are you doing the best job at serving the online audience for that particular topic.

Louise: I think when it comes to ranking as well - both you and I rank. You can’t just say, you can’t rank with Squarespace - that’s just simply not true. I discovered you on Google for what you want to rank for. You definitely just can’t say that you’re not going to rank with Squarespace.

Link Building

Charlotte: Exactly. Another thing that I wanted to talk about too - when people ask is Squarespace bad for SEO - let’s talk about that in the context of link building. Link building is one of the biggest SEO strategies out there. It basically means that other websites are linking back to your website. Google notices those links, and they’ll reward you because the links come from a high-quality website - a high domain authority ideally. So, again, this is an example of it being platform agnostic. It doesn’t matter that your website is on Squarespace if these other websites are linking to you. You could have a WordPress website or a Squarespace website – either way they’re linking back to your site and all those backlinks are really good for you. Google is going to pay attention, they’re going to notice. It doesn’t really matter that you have a Squarespace website, because people are talking about you and linking to you. It would be the same if you were on WordPress.

Louise: And, as you said, Squarespace want you to rank, so they’ve done so much on their end to help you with your SEO efforts as well.

Mobile Responsive

Charlotte: Exactly. The final thing I wanted to talk about is about having a mobile responsive website. Now, increasingly, Google is prioritizing websites that are mobile responsive. That is really just a fancy way of saying that your website works properly on iPhones or tablets – different size devices than just a basic laptop or desktop. With Squarespace, one of their biggest features is that all of the Squarespace websites out there are mobile responsive - which means that they will display properly and correctly on any sized screen. That is one of the biggest features for Google, because they know that more and more people are browsing online on their phones and viewing websites on their phones or their iPads. So, the fact that your website, because it’s on Squarespace, is automatically mobile responsive, already gives you a leg up from some of the other websites that don’t have that feature.

Louise: That is just one of the examples of what Squarespace does for us. I love that it’s done automatically for us.

That concludes our Squarespace SEO series for now. Charlotte has so much good content to share with us, so I’m sure I will be having her back. If you want to up your Squarespace game – hopefully we have inspired you to do that – then you definitely want to grab Charlotte’s checklist – I’ll leave the link in the description below for you. If you know that your website needs work, that you need a high-converting website, I’ll also leave a link for my free trial of my course down below.

If you loved this video and this series, please let us know below. We would love to hear from you. Don’t forget to subscribe to our channels – we are always talking about Squarespace and sharing tons of tips - and I’m sure we’ll be back soon with some more Squarespace SEO lessons.

Get Charlotte's SEO checklist: https://www.charlotteohara.ca/ss-seo-...

Get a free trial of my course here: https://www.louisehenry.com/join Charlotte's website: https://www.charlotteohara.ca

My website: https://www.louisehenry.com

Subscribe to Charlotte's channel: https://bit.ly/3b4b88N

Try Squarespace: https://www.louisehenry.com/squarespace (use the code SIDEKICK10 for 10% off)